Written by Roy Gill and directed by Ken Bentley.

Spoiler-free verdict: A gleeful genre satire that captures the joy of Missy as a character and the queer chaos she brings.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

Well, it was inevitable. Missy’s aesthetics finally produce a story about her as the evil Marry Poppins she resembles. Who could have guessed, though, that it would be so delightful?

The magic nanny genre has a rich history in modern culture. We have our Mary Poppinses, our Nanny McPhees, and so on. As TV Tropes describes it:

“A Magical Nanny is a woman who is hired to look after children, but ends up having a profound effect on the whole family. She may have genuine magical powers or she may just have a magical effect on the household. Even children who have scared off a number of previous nannies can be tamed by a Magical Nanny.”

There’s a lot of things implicit in this. I mean, the idea that children need to be “tamed” is, well, yikes. But it speaks to a coded idea for a family, and typically, a very English, upper-class one.

Doctor Who has played with the genre before. The Snowmen uses Clara as such, with some subtle implicit critique: she’s not an upper-class Governess but rather a barmaid, and there’s a nice moment about how their detached father needs to stop hiring people to care for his children and actually look out for them. It’s a small element in the story, but a welcome one, and it points to how things are done here.

Because Missy is, unlike Clara, in no way someone that should be allowed around children. She is a creature of id and chaos, and so binding her in a world of Victorian rules and, indeed, capitalism, creates an implict tension. Writer Roy Gill relishes in the details of this aesthetic, embracing magic and steampunk as part of the havoc she wreaks on a buttoned-down world. The ideas and imagery here are marvelous, from the brilliant opening scene where Michelle Gomez discusses murdering a phoenix and then pushing a man off a roof, to the zany climax in which she uses a genie to hijack a steam train at speeds in excess of 30 miles per hour. Suffice to say, there is a lot of fun to be had.

And that’s the point of this story, in the end. Missy as a character crashes into the old, familiar character of the Master and blows him up from cackling villain to source of chaotic joy, just as she does with the magical nanny genre. A more cynical Master story would probably, have her kill the precocious and mildly irritating children she takes under her charge, but instead, Missy serves as their inspiration, to embrace the chaos in themselves and break from Victorian boundaries. Telling this story from their perspective is a strong choice to foreground this theme, even if some of the narration works better than other bits. Her frockish disregard for the rigid nuclear family and gender expectations turns Missy into something very nearly aspirational, to the point where the kids resolve to be bad enough to get Missy’s attention again one day.

There’s also something distinctly queer about this chaos, in the sense of queer as a rejection of norms and embracing of personal expression and identity. Both Oliver and Lucy are kids stifled in their expression, Oliver in his scientific experimentation and Lucy in her rigid adherence to rules, both learning to more freely express themselves through Missy’s chaos. It’s no shock that this story has Missy reminiscing about a wife, if nothing else. She is a very queer character, tearing apart gender, sexuality, and society in general, and this is the sort of story that naturally extends from that. By doing so, we get a model for what a Missy story looks like: though violent and chaotic, Missy is a lot of fun, and inspires embracing of the chaos in us all.

This is all, of course, surface level. This is a very pleasures-at-the-surface kind of story, racing from mad image to mad image with wild abandon, but not necessarily constructing much deeper underneath. There’s some walls it hits with that: the exoticism with the genie, for example, hits complex issues of orientalism in esoterica and Victorian society without really digging deep into them, and “lock up the rulemakers in a genie’s bottle” is in no way praxis (it is, on the other hand, hilarious). But it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes, light, queer, chaotic fun is all you need. A Spoonful of Mayhem achieves that, while defining what a Missy story can look like for other writers to come. All in all, a strong start to a brand new range.

8/10